


reluctant bonding

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [42]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky's Overdeveloped Caretaking Instinct, Disabled Character, Gen, Just Add Kittens, Mentally Ill Character, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, small kitten care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 13:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13705407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: The kitten wants to be somewhereonBucky just about all of the time. And she makes a lot of fucking noise until she gets what she wants.





	reluctant bonding

**Author's Note:**

> Brief reference to the most common (and rather distressing) animal control methods of the pre-War world. Follows [amassing supplies](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5459237). 
> 
> This fic is part of [**this series**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), which is for short-fic associated with my fic [**your blue-eyed boys**](http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477), because I needed somewhere to stash it.

The kitten wants to be somewhere _on_ Bucky just about all of the time. And she makes a lot of fucking noise until she gets what she wants. 

Her cries are both tiny and somehow really not tiny at all. They're little high-pitched squeaks, but something - Mother Nature, God, the fact that all the ones that didn't figure it out died and didn't have any kittens of their own, something - clearly fucking designed those squeaks for exactly the pitch to carry straight through everything and drill right into the back of your skull. 

Or at least, his skull. 

It means she basically gets what she wants, because his head can't handle the noises and when she's on top of him she stops making them. And even at night she wants to be on him more than she wants to be on the God-fucking-damned heating pad. 

The second time they have this go-around on the second night, after Bucky stares at her and says _no I am actually not fucking sure my body-temperature fucking stays as warm as she's supposed to fucking be when I'm asleep, okay?_ Steve hits Google, saying something about being pretty sure that this is the kind of thing there's instructional videos for. 

Like five fucking minutes later, Steve's found a YouTube channel with some skinny blonde lady with a _lot_ of tattoos, who apparently just literally spends her whole fucking life fucking fostering baby cats because that's a fucking thing that happens in the twenty-first fucking century, because the twenty-first fucking century likes fucking with Bucky's head. 

And just about a longer into a video on comforting kittens than Bucky can fucking take, she just says to wrap a kitten up in a fucking fuzzy blanket for warmth and comfort. And okay, they have fucking fuzzy blankets and if it'll make her stop and make sure she doesn't get cold enough her stupid fucking little organs stop fucking working right and he doesn't have to deal with the itching discomfort at the back of his head about having the heating pad itself near him - fine. Fuck. Whatever. 

"If you ever fucking use the fucking word 'purrito' I will fucking kill you in your fucking sleep," he tells Steve, convincing neither of them. 

He also gets Steve to send him the fucking link to the fucking lady's fucking YouTube - which is just "The Kitten Lady" because of fucking course it is - so he can look at the other shit the next day. It's probably fucking useful and he'll probably fucking feel better if he feels like he fucking knows more and even if the whole thing makes his fucking head hurt she does fucking seem to know what the fuck she's talking about. 

So he wraps the fucking idiot kitten up in a blanket and puts the blanket up against the top of his right shoulder so her stupid head is against his skin and presumably she can smell where the fuck she is. The little moron snuggles into it, and doesn't try to worm her way out. 

After a second or two of them being settled down, Steve says, "I mean, she is purring pretty loud right now and it is wrapped up like - " and Bucky mimes smothering him in the fucking pillow. 

The kitten stays wrapped up in the fucking blanket, tucked against his fucking shoulder and purring in his fucking ear until the next time she's hungry. 

While Bucky feeds her, Steve digs in one of the cupboards and puts something in the microwave. By the time she's dug in the litter a bit and started mewing to get picked up, Steve's handing Bucky the bag full of barley or some fucking shit like that, another thing with heat that mostly didn't work.

The idea is you stick it in the microwave and it heats up and it can't get hotter than when you take it out of the microwave, so in theory the irrational back of Bucky's brain wouldn't be insisting that it was going to go wrong and melt into his skin like the heating pad. But it turned out that it was just . . . not useful, because once it was hot enough it actually felt like it was doing fuck all for more than five minutes, it was hot enough to make him edgy even if he knew better. 

When Steve hands it to him now, it's warm but not that hot, and when Bucky gives him a puzzled look, Steve says, "Wrap it in the blanket, set it up by your head or something, she can sleep curled up by your neck and it can be warm enough for a few hours but it won't bug you. Maybe. And you won't worry she's got tangled up and suffocated herself and if she gets too hot she can get off it." 

It's . . . not a stupid idea. Bucky thinks it might even be something from the Kitten Lady video he was having a hard time focusing on. And the kitten's already crawled her way up his shirt to curl up on his shoulder next to his neck and purr like a little fucking motorboat so fuck, sure, it might work. 

But now he feels derailed again, and like he's just noticed - properly - that Steve's awake and it's his fault (the kitten's fault, but the kitten is his fault, ergo his fault) except that thought runs into another one of _stop apologizing for stupid shit, for fuck's sake_ \- 

And he just sort of ends up standing there staring for a second until Steve's turning him around by the shoulders, steering him towards the bedroom. 

He manages an irritable mutter of _God-damn guilt-tripping kids_ , not because he even means it really but because it makes him feel a little less like a brain-damaged blanked out mess. Steve pulls him over to settle with his left arm across Steve's waist, and the blanket-wrapped barley thing in the space between his head and his right shoulder. 

The idiot kitten immediately climbs on, curls up right up against his shoulder, and purrs herself to sleep, little forepaws kneading at nothing. 

 

The next day passes more or less on the flattened futon, with the tablet, and the stupid YouTube channel. 

Chloe the vet student accosts Steve in the hallway in the morning to tell him that the phone-number she gave Bucky yesterday is also totally okay for texts if he needs to ask anything, and he passes that on - which . . . is easier than needing to call, but it's still even easier to just watch the fucking tablet like some kind of fucking zombie for a while. 

Asking questions is not fucking comfortable and he's too tired to fight with that now. 

The part where he ends up with this stupid low-level aggravation through the whole thing isn't the YouTube-lady's fault. Far as Bucky can tell, she's pretty damn smart, good at teaching, does a lot of work in her field and has the respect of a lot of major organizations. The problem is almost entirely in his head and too many fucking . . . things needing to move in too many ways that just get the fuck in each other's way. 

It just comes down to, the last time he was really fucking paying any attention to this shit, if you had surplus kittens, you drowned them - and that was the kind thing, so they didn't slowly starve to death. It's hard to fucking reconcile that with the world this lady apparently lives in, except this is the real world, and apparently shit changed that much, and now this of all things is making him trip over and over again. 

And there's stuff that is different that doesn't . . . clash in his head, that still makes pretty good sense - like there's always been girls like LeAnn, kids who find something injured or hurt or starving and take it in and try to nurse it back to health. And people who want kittens to survive even if the cat doesn't, for whatever reason, so even formula and knowing how to use it, a vet knowing that shit - that all makes sense. He can grasp that. 

But when you get to the point where some smart, good-looking lady basically runs a whole education operation based on teaching thousands of people what to do to save surplus kittens and travels across the country for this and it's normal - 

It's not even that it's a bad thing, it's just, it's like the fucking cat tree and his whole fucking head says fuck you, he's not even going to try to understand it. 

Then you add just how many tattoos the lady's got and it's one more piece of discontinuity right as parts of him are trying to reach back and figure out how to be a fucking human being that cares about shit. Sure, he'd known women with that many tattoos, once upon a time. Really fucking smart ones. 

They just didn't get invited to be keynote speakers for major municipal institutions. To put it mildly. 

For as much as he can actually wrap his head around it, Bucky even thinks that's good. It's all good. It's just he keeps hitting the wall, hitting this point where trying to keep all this shit in his head at the same time is like the moment you step down a staircase and expect another stair, but you hit the bottom while you weren't looking. 

Subconscious expectation and reality don't match, and you stumble. 

Although he's pretty sure "purrito" would be fucking obnoxious anyway. 

Most of the stuff she says on the video lines up with the paper - just more depth, more detail, plus watching her fucking do the things helps, a bit. Although considering there weren't any more fights from down in the Maligaya condo, which means LeAnn was doing the work, after watching about half the stuff on the channel Bucky honestly wonders how the girl wasn't fucking falling over dead tired all the time. Especially it can't be very long that the litter's been actually even pissing and shitting on their own. 

The kid is going to over-commit and work herself into a collapse come college. 

When the kitten's awake, she responds to the noises from the recorded kittens on the tablet - but not like she wants to know where the other kittens are. In fact the first time, her noises start sounding more like when he tries to put her down anywhere and she climbs as fast as she can to the top of his shoulder, shoving her face into his neck until he reaches up and holds her there. Then she flattens against his shoulder and starts to purr. 

She falls asleep there for a couple hours. 

Upside, at least that means she probably won't be fucking lonely. Or whatever. 

Around two in the afternoon he hits his saturation point for cheerful fucking kitten lessons, so he turns off the tablet and turns on one of the home-reno shows he can mostly ignore. His back is trying to convince him there's a fucking white-hot razor working its way out of his left side so he lies down, putting the kitten on his upper abdomen instead of his shoulder. 

She doesn't even wake up. 

 

When Steve gets home, he actually manages to notice something right away, which is a fucking first. Specifically, he stops and says, "Are you tooth-brushing her head?" 

"Yeah," Bucky says, because he is, and knows he sounds resigned. "Lady with the video channel says it's a good fake for mother cat's tongue or . . . something. Little idiot seems to like it, anyway." 

"She does look pretty happy," Steve concurs, which, since the little orange moron is stretched out almost on her back, legs pointing straight forward and back, chin up and purring like a fucking chainsaw, is a fucking understatement. 

A normal person'd probably find a way to at least talk about the rest of the shit he fucking looked at today, or ask questions about what Steve did with his, but the non-existent razor in his back has moved up to something he can't even fucking describe in his neck and the base of his skull, so Bucky just . . . stops, conversation stalls out. 

Could be worse, though. 

He can feel the vibration of the stupid kitten's purring through his ribs and his breast-bone, until she finishes falling asleep and goes silent.


End file.
